Wagner James Au / New World Notes

SL Friday Fashion Looks from Entrancing Blogger Clau Dagger

July 19, 2024
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Clau Dagger SL is a great fashion and decor blog by Clau Dagger. I featured it in 2021 when her cohesive style and scene-setting entranced me. She still excels at creating a cohesive picture. “This Is Wrong” is her post for today and has the most fabulous scene. I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s exciting .
- LORE Throne of Shadows [PG][auto-detect] (Midnight Order) July 20 – August 20
- LORE Dais of Shadows [Red] (Midnight Order) July 20 – August 20
- DRD – Cauldron Shoppe – Cauldron Cluster
- DRD – Cauldron Shoppe – Cauldron Cornucopia
- DRD – Apocalyptic Hideout – Building PG
- DRD – San Mora – Building – E
- – Dirty Rat – Ancient Ruins w/o.Cliffs
- (Milk Motion) Volcano
- (Milk Motion) Nuclear bomb
- {anc} chemical sparks
- E.V.E ROBOTIC WARS – The Alien Drone (Rust)
For more, click here:

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Seraphim & NWN Partner Bad Unicorn Beta Launch HUD for Shopping & Events — Here’s How to Get It!

July 19, 2024

Cool project from Seraphim SL and proud NWN partner Bad Unicorn: A shopping HUD for in-world events and direct item purchases from many brands. Mr. Unicorn himself explains the basics in the video above, including his upcoming shopping event The Cloud, which kicks off July 23.

Click to teleport to get the HUD here.

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New on My Patreon: Why Matthew Ball’s “The Metaverse” Still Matters — An In-Depth Q&A With the Author on the Influential Book’s New Edition

July 18, 2024

Free for all Patreon members, I just published a deep dive Q&A with Matthew Ball on the eve of his influential book, The Metaverse, hitting bookstores with a greatly expanded new edition.

Matt was one of the key individuals to make the Metaverse mainstream in the business world in recent years, which revived interest in long-running virtual worlds like Second Life and even helped lead to Facebook become Meta.

Since the first edition, of course, "Metaverse" itself has lost its luster as a buzzword in Silicon Valley — so can it even be recovered as a term, and restored to prominence?

Or as I put it to Matt:

"Looking back at the hype wave of say, 2020 to 2022 — do you think there's anything we could have done in retrospect to avoid the backlash that did happen?"

Read his answer and much more here. And if you enjoy the read, please consider subscribing to my Patreon for more exclusive content and benefits.
My Favorite SL Photos from a Flickr Galley of Ocean-Themed Imagery

July 18, 2024

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

BlazeAme’s “Storm for hours…but after the sea show its glare…hold steady” is extraordinary. It has a Pre-Raphaelite kind of romantic beauty. It’s extraordinary and so is BlazeAme.That’s why I featured her work back in 2021. It’s time to take another look since people’s art evolves over time. But that’s for another day.

Today I want to talk about how I found this pic. CelestialDemon suggested I check out his gallery. Galleries are a fun little feature on Flickr where you can create albums of other people’s work, in this case on the theme Ocean.They are also a great tool to find new artists.

For more from the Ocean Gallery, click here:

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Second Life-Based Mini-MMO Adds ChatGPT & Other AI Tech to Gameplay Including NPCs, Story Bible, and Quest Generator

July 17, 2024

Crack Den, the long-running urban roleplay mini-MMO in Second Life — think a text-driven GTA Online, but both more creative and adult-rated — just added AI interaction to its roleplay gaming systems. If I’m not mistaken, this is one of the first live MMOs to integrate LLMs like ChatGPT into gameplay. (It might actually be the very first!)

The AI for Crack Den roleplay comes in several flavors: The Story HUD for giving out quests, Live Character Cards for NPCs, AI-generated dialog from NPCs, and for querying Crack Den’s massive story canon and rules database. To do that, lead developer Nadir Taov is leveraging multiple LLMs:

“If it’s answering questions or generating summaries that can be vanilla, it’s GPT 4o. [See above -WJA] If it’s story-related, I switch to more unrestricted models that are tuned for roleplay too. At least three different models in play: MythoMax and LLama3 so far … new models seem to be popping up every few months and each require special ways to structure prompts so I’m exploring when I can. I’m trying to see if how agnostic I can get to the models though.”

Linden Lab recently experimented with LLM-powered NPCs in a test area, but Crack Den is a thriving and highly active roleplay game. First launched in 2006 as a rickety RPG where stories and quests were conveyed by in-world notecards, the core player base has remained, evolved, and grown together. To this day (by Nadir’s estimate) some 5,000 SLers visit the mini-world of Crack Den every month, perhaps to participate in the mayhem, or to gawk like post-apocalyptic tourists and the desperately seedy goings-on.

Launched last weekend, Nadir tells me the community reception has been pretty good — and even helped bring in some new players:

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Watch: Drone Footage of Real World Converted Into Virtual World Through Gaussian Splatting

July 17, 2024

Remember HoloBike from Saga, a new indie project which recently launched a Kickstarter, raising 4x its target goal? It basically integrates a virtual world with an exercise bike — without needing a VR headset.

Courtesy founder/lead engineer Samuel Matson (who last worked in Google's VR division), here's some video which shows how Saga intends to create that virtual world. What you're looking at above was actually first captured by a drone in the real world, with an algorithmic process which converted it into this virtual scene:

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RP1 Metaverse Browser Demo Happening Live Now — VR Not Required!

July 17, 2024

Happening right now, enter here. I believe it'll be live until 1pm PT, so hurry! You can enter via your web browser and get the full spatial audio effect with a headset. (I just did that myself, as did about a couple dozen other people that I saw.) The graphics are rudimentary, but the live social audio and the scale is impressive.

They're calling it an "AWE Afterparty", because it's a live demo of what they showed off at the Augmented World Expo a few weeks ago. As I wrote then:

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The Metaverse Only “Failed” For Those Who Don’t Understand the Concept

July 16, 2024

I just had a long and fascinating interview with Matthew Ball, who has a greatly updated version of his book The Metaverse, now subtitled Building the Spatial Internet, coming out on on July 23. I'll publish that soon, but meantime, here's Matt's interview with two people who've been building the foundation of the Metaverse since the 90s — Epic's Tim Sweeney, and of course, literal Neal Stephenson.

There's much too much too summarize in a post here, but one highlight is how much the actual conceivers of the Metaverse, both as an idea and as an actual product, are confident about its underlying thesis. The only thing that's "failed" since the recent backlash against the term is the straw man version that had little relation to what was actually described back in 1992.

As Sweeney puts it:

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SL Mobile App Downloaded Over 20,000 Times In First 3 Weeks, Reaching Roughly 1 in 3 of Total Qualifying Users

July 16, 2024

That was fast. Since launching on June 25, Second Life's mobile app for iOS and Android has been downloaded well over 20,000 times. That's a safe estimate, because Google Play now lists the Android version of the app as having over 10,000 downloads, and smartphone usage between iOS and Android typically skews 50/50, very roughly speaking. Based on previous reporting, I'd estimate iOS/Android ownership among SLers skews about 60/40, so estimating 20,000+ is on the conservative side.

Notably, that's double the Google Play downloads from only last week.

Also notable: Only Premium/Premium+ users can currently use the app, so quite a lot of them have installed the mobile app:

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Stunning Second Life Landscape Photos by Sandy Philipp — And Teleport Links to These Locations!

July 16, 2024

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Sandy Phlipp’s “Misty Mountains” is a stunning picture. I love how the sun shines through the clouds and the between the long needles on that evergreen that has grown sideways under the pressure of constant mountain winds. I love the detail of the birds flying above the tree, into the sunlight. Though this is a more rugged scene, the clouds and the light in this picture remind me of John Constable’s landscapes. But you can go an visit this place. [To teleport, click here]

Thanks, Domitalia Jinx, for recommending her. If other readers have recommendations, please let me know.

For more fabulous landscapes, click here:

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